What: Reveal When: Sins Plot Warnings/Rating: None
He had been a statue, carved of marble to the eye, but pliable and easily damaged when hands met with his stone skin. He had been desirous. Needy. Wanton. Willing to take any kind of punishment and be used in any brutal way so long as the person with him was pleased by him, loved him, in some small way.
And he had been a vision of physical perfection, or at least his mind had told him so. He rested his head carefully against his palms. He was exhausted, and no longer alone in his own mind. That hadn't occurred to him over the course of the night either, that he had been deliciously quiet in his head, but, then again, he'd been focused on other things. There had been people to seek out and please, and a man to tattoo. Of course.
He felt a bit like curling in on himself and never going out again. How humiliating, that this should happen to him twice, now. Twice forced to go somewhere he didn't wish to go, twice warped into a horrible caricature of all his worst qualities, naked and raw. The last time this had happened, though, it led to Evan after. This time, he was alone in his office.
He tightened his fingertips against his skull for a moment, then stood up. He was not going to sit around feeling sorry for himself. So the world had made a joke of him again. What did it matter? Nothing had changed. No one would ever know who he was. And Loki, though he was again present, wasn't speaking to him, it seemed. Either he hadn't attended, or he had no interest in divulging his experience.
He went to the small bathroom in the office. He would clean himself up and go home. The sun was just above the horizon, and all he really wanted for the moment was to sleep. Later, he would need to check in with the family, since they had undoubtedly been there to the last man and woman, enduring who knew what kind of horrors. He turned on the tap, and dashed cool water onto his face. He hadn't forgotten the words of the man with the tattoo, his maxims of forgiving and moving on. He could still feel the strange sting of where the words had been on his chest, but the ink was gone. So easy, those words - live and forgive. Easy to say. Not as easy to put into practice.
He took a deep breath, flushing the scent of sex and stone dust from his nose, glanced up at the mirror, and froze. He'd seen his reflection only once all night, in a pool of water in the garden, but it hadn't registered as anything more than the vision of perfection gifted to him by the artist who had sculpted him, an ideal, impossibly beautiful, the sort of face that brought armies into line and sank a thousand ships. Classical, perfect, unachievable.
Louis touched his jaw, and his reflection moved too.
His face. Without a single feature altered, it had been his face on the statue.